Prehistopia Incident
The Prehistopia Incident was an influential period of time between July 29, 2010 and August 1, 2010. It involved the head Eliberator, Aequitas, tricking the assistant administrator of the forum into granting him admin rights, and later the conflict with him to regain the forum. Timeline July 27, 2 days before incident *A new account called "Phil" signs up on Prehistopia. It is activated by the Prehistopian executive, Lord of the Allosaurs. *8 guests are spotted viewing Prehistopia, easily twice the forum average. *"Phil" views the forum, and begins to discuss with Spinosaur King and Lord of the Allosaurs via PM. July 28, 1 day before incident *"Phil" leaves Prehistopia. *In the afternoon, approx. 24 hours before the incident, a new account by the name of Gaminglord signs up on Prehistopia. Gaminglord is Spinosaur King's youtube username. His IP matches that of PaudieN1. *Approximately 18 hours before the incident, Spinosaur King activates Gaminglord's account. The mysterious user signs in and begins exploring the forum, but not posting. July 29, day of incident *Gaminglord returns and continues to view the forum, but still does not post. *6 hours before the incident, most users have returned to the forum in the morning. Discussions continue as normal. *2 hours before the incident, Spinosaur King notices a staggering 12 guests viewing the forum, three times the average. *About 1 hour before the incident, Spinosaur King asks Lord of the Allosaurs to check other Xobor forums, to see if they have the same number of guests viewing them. Lord of the Allosaurs searches through over 20 forums. *45 minutes before the incident, Lord of the Allosaurs reports that Prehistopia is the only forum to have this large number of guests. *Approx. 30 minutes before the incident, Gaminglord logs back into Prehistopia. Lord of the Allosaurs, meanwhile, leaves to visit Youtube. *10-15 minutes before the incident, Lord of the Allosaurs returns to Prehistopia. *5 minutes before the incident, Gaminglord's IP changes to match that of Spinosaur King. He sends LOTA a PM claiming he is Spinosaur King, and that the account known as Spinosaur King had been hacked, convincing LOTA that the board was at risk. LOTA, believing him, grants Gaminglord admin rights. *Time of incident, Gaminglord explores the admin panel, before deleting every user on the forum. He then discards his disguise and reveals his true identity: Aequitas the Eliberator. *Immediately after the incident, the users are logged out of Prehistopia and conclude that the forum has been hacked. *A few minutes after the incident, Aequitas removes all content from Prehistopia, replaces it with new content, and begins to troll. *Spinosaur King re-opens his back-up board, Paleo Insanity II (later to be re-named Imperial Palace), so that the Prehistopians could temporarily flee there until the crisis had ended. He had created Paleo Insanity II a few days earlier. Some users flee to it, while others join PaudieN1's forum Paleo Place. *Around 15-30 minuets after the incident, Aequitas publicaly announces the attack on Prehistopia, stating that he is in total control. He demands that Spinosaur King and Ohyeah Spinosaurus admit to being trolls and appologise. If these terms were not met, Aequitas will remain in control of the board, and he will destroy it. *The users of the Topix Dinosaur Forum attack Aequitas with insults, who cooly "backed up" his claims, while stating that they had 24 hours to meet his terms, otherwise Prehistopia would be destroyed. *Spinosaur King initialy ignores Aequitas, and flees to Xobor's support forum, asking for help. July 30, 1 day after incident *Approx. 15 hours after the incident, Spinosaur King returns to Topix in the morning, and replies to Aequitas for the first time, stating that he would not meet Aequitas's terms, and that even if he did, Ohyeah wouldn't as he had left many weeks before. *The users of Topix continue to attack Aequitas, leaving many of the senior users distressed at the goings on. *Around 18 hours after the incident, Aequitas arrives back on Topix, stating that time was nearly up for his conditions to be met. He see's the insults aimed at him, and simple insults back in a cool manner. *Once he sees that Spinosaur King has outright refused to cooperate, Aequitas annonces that just for Spino King's stubborness, he would completely wreck Prehistopia, and retain it for himself. *Spinosaur King decides not to reply, but instead loggs into Xobor's support forum again, noticing that his plea for help had been answered. However, his hopes were dashed. Xobor had managed to make an account on the forum, and reported that Aequitas had changed most of the board's settings already, such as certain template settings, the board's title had been removed, and all previous content on the site had been completely deleted; not even the categories remained. Instead, Aequitas had recently, (within the last few hours) replaced the content with trollish, and rude remarks against him and fellow Topixians, declaring Prehistopia a domain for trolling. Xobor told Spino King that he had 3 options: #He could sign up in the forum again. Support would give him the Admin rights again and he could rebuild the Forum. #Xobor's technician could use a backup to restore the board to the state of the day before the changes. Unfortunately this would take some time and effort, so they couldn't offer the service for free. The actual price depended on the time it would take the technicians to recover the board, but it would be around 40 to 50 Euros. #The third option would be to sign up at Prehistopia forum again and order a 12 month ad-free premium package once Spino King had admin rights again. All premium customers get one free backup recovery, so Spinosaur King would basically pay the same (ad free is 4.95/month) but get an ad-free board for the next 12 months. *Approx. 20 hours after the incident, Spinosaur King thought these offers throught, and came to the conclusion that he could not afford to pay for Prehistopia to be restored, and he could not afford to pay for the premium package either. Finally, the realisation that Prehistopia was gone, sweeps through him. So, he chooses option 1, and registeres again on Prehistopia, before being given administrator rights again by Xobor. Once there, he permanently moves Aequitas's account into the banned user group, and archives all the troll sections and threads on the board. Instead of re-building Prehistopia, however, Spinosaur King comes to the dificult decision to abandon Prehistopia. He realises that there is almost no way thae he could re-build it and it is certainly nearly impossible to recover any of the lost content. At that, he logs out of Prehistopia for what he believed would be the final time. *Spinosaur King returns to Topix, and announces that bad news, Aequitas merely sneers at him, while the other users announce their shock, and retaliate by continuing to attack Aequitas. *Minuets later, Spinosaur King loggs back into Imperial palace, and announces tha e back news there, seeing that the recent events had stired the community up a fair bit in the last 24 hours or so. Arguments were erupting, and Spinosaur King decided to reveal Aequitas's true identity. Spino King logged back into Prehistopia, and copied Aequitas's IP, before pasting it into an IP tracker. Aequitas's Ip was revealed to have changed many tiomes in the past few days, and had changed from Spinosaur Kings exact IP at the time of the attack, to what it is then; PaudieN1's exact IP. *Around 22 hours after the incident, Spinosaur King announces his findings on both Paleo Insanity II, and Topix, claiming that PaudieN1 was a traitor. After paudie arrives and denies these claims, Spino King calles for Paudie to sign up on Paleo Insanity II to prove his innocence (Spino King has IP Range Banned Aequitas's IP address). Paudie promptly does so, signing up and even posting on Imperial Palace without a problem. *Spinosaur King appologises for his mistakes, and comes up with a theory that Aequitas regularly changes his IP because he is using some type of Proxy Server. *The community is shocked and devastated by these recent revelations, and some users annouce that they are taking a short break from the forums. Quickly, the Prehistopian community begins to fall apart, with most users, some of them new, such as Zero Percent Wrong, flee to Paleo Place, paudies forum which was opened the previous month as an alternative to Prehistopia, and which had been largely inactive due to the fact that Prehistopia was already an established forum board. July 31, 2 days after incident *Defeated and totaly helpless, Spinosaur King contemplates permanent exile from the community, and considers closing his back up board, Imperial Palace. *On Paleo Insanity I, the small number of Prehistopians that had fled there, begin to discuss what to do next. Some suggest that they should go there seperate ways, while others think that they should attempt to rebuild the shattered community. *Spinosaur King logs back into Imperial Palace, and joins in the discussion, stating what everyone already knew; that Prehistopia was gone, and that the conent lost on that forum would never be regained. *After a long think, and some persuasion from one or two other memebers, Spinosaur King announces that Paleo Insanity II (Later, it would be renamed Imperial Palace) will replace Prehistopia, and that they will try and, to an extent, re-build the Prehistopian community. *Work begins on the new forum, to make as many of the nessacery sections as possible, and then the first one or two threads are made. *Aequitas continues to post on Topix, albeit less often. Topix strugles to get back on topic following the, by now very high profile demise of Prehistopia. August 1, 3 days after incident *Paleo Place swells with new users, and the forum becomes very active, peaking in the top 20 Xobor forum list, by the number of hits per 24 hours. *The shattered Prehistopia community struggles to come to terms with the loss of Prehistopia. Many users simply leave the community, instead posting on Topix and/or Paleo Place. *Aequitas the Eliberator posts on Topix for what would be the last time in over 7 months, until his return in April 2011, before leaving Topix, vowing that Spinosaur King had paid, but not enough, and that he (Aequitas) would return to finish the job in the future. *Despite Aequitas' departure, Topix continues to reel at the loss of Prehistopia, with on-topic discussions almost completely flushed out. *Spinosaur King logs back into his new forum, to find that it is already growing stale, due to the fact that no one can focus properly after the demise of Prehistopia, and that the majority of Topics have already been covered, either on Prehistopia, or on Topix or Paleo Place. *Discussions on the new forum consist mainly of rememberence thread about Prehistopia. *Spinosaur King announces the official end of the Prehistopia Empire, and the formal, indefinate abandonement of Prehistopia. *The strugle to re-build the community begins. Aftermath and Legacy The imediate aftermath of the Prehistopia Incident was shocking. The community quickly fell apart, with most users leaving to join Paleo Place, and some arguing amongst themselves. Discussions quickly became stale on Paleo Insanity II, and the long strugle to re-build the comunity began. Although Prehistopia was gone forever, the remaing remnant of the Prehistopia communit, with the help of some new arrivals, began to try and re-build the community from scratch, while re-naming themselvs "The Imperials". They strugge to maintain PaleoInsanity II's activness in the shadow of Paleo Place, which had blossomed in the wake of Prehistopia's demise. Many of the former Prehistopians fled there, become the Paleo Placer's. Because of the enormityof the Incident, it took many months for the new forum to become active, but, atlast, in December 2010, some of the older, senior users came back, such as Ohyeah, and, with the arrival of others such as Zero Perecnt Wrong, alongside new, interesting Topic's, the board finaly beganto get to it's unsteady feet. The site, know known as Imperial Palace, began to become more successful, and began to rival Paleo Place, and even Prehistopia in its hayday. Eventualy, on April 14th 2011, Imperial Palace reached 3000 posts, exceedin it's predecessor, Prehistopia, while also becoming the first forum in the history of the community to exceed 3000 posts, with the exception of Topix. To this day, the forum continues to grow, while, for various reasons, Paleo Place, has slowly become less active. Only recently, has the community managed to reach the success of Prehistopia, despite knowing that the content on that old forum is gone forever. Imperial was un-able to replicate the imediate hit that was Prehistopia, but now the wounds of the terrible incident in 2010, are healing well, and the community has, for the most part, moved on. Category:Disasters Category:Hackings